According to Bligh, Fletcher Christian was ‘Dark & very swarthy’, with ‘Blackish or very dark brown’ hair. Standing about five foot nine, he was strongly built, although his ‘knees stands a little out and may be called a little bow legged’. Others would later describe his ‘bright, pleasing countenance, and tall, commanding figure’. While born in Cumberland, Christian had more recently been based on the Isle of Man, where his family had old, strong connections, and where Bligh had been living after his marriage.
Fletcher, it was said by his family, had ‘staid at school longer than young men generally do who enter into the navy’. His first sea experience had been as a midshipman on the Eurydice in 1783, when he was eighteen and a half years of age – remarkably late in the day for a young man with his sights set on a naval career. After six months spent at anchorage in Spithead, the Eurydice had sailed for India, and for the next twenty-one months, Christian had been exposed to some of the most exotic parts of the world: Madeira, Cape Town, Madras and the Malabar Coast. Christian’s biographer would conjure the steaming coastal settlements the new midshipman encountered on this first voyage: most notably, the British Fort Saint George at Madras, defiantly set to survey the sea and surrounded by the residences of the English traders and officials, the busy traffic of lumbering oxen and sweating palanquin bearers, the rowdy trade of fine cotton, spices and green doves. The Eurydice was a ship of war, with a complement of 140 men, including a unit of marines, and Christian had also experienced for the first time British naval life in all its coarseness – bad food, complete lack of privacy, irregular sleep and rough discipline. Yet he must have prospered, or at least shown promise, for the ship’s muster indicates that some seven months out from England, he had been promoted from midshipman to master’s mate.
Christian had returned from India in high spirits, telling a relative that ‘it was very easy to make one’s self beloved and respected on board a ship; one had only to be always ready to obey one’s superior officers, and to be kind to the common men.’ This promising start was somewhat derailed by the inconvenient peace, which had put so many ships out of commission and, like Bligh, Christian had turned his sights from naval service to the merchant trade. The decision to approach Bligh, then working for Duncan Campbell, had been prompted, as a relative advised, because ‘it would be very desirable for him to serve under so experienced a navigator as Captain Bligh, who had been Sailing-master to Captain Cook.’
To Christian’s request for a position, however, Bligh had returned the polite response that he already had all the officers he could carry. This was undoubtedly true, but the fact that Bligh did not stretch himself to accommodate the eager young man, as he was to do for so many young gentlemen on the Bounty, suggests that he was not in any way beholden to the Christian family; Fletcher had approached Bligh, it would appear, without benefit of interest.
Upon receiving this rebuff, Christian was undeterred; indeed, he rose to the occasion, volunteering to work before the mast until a vacancy arose among the officers.
‘Wages were no object, he only wished to learn his profession,’ he had told Bligh, adding, ‘we Mid-shipmen are gentlemen, we never pull at a rope; I should even be glad to go one voyage in that situation, for there may be occasions, when officers may be called upon to do the duties of a common man.’
To this honourable request Bligh had responded favourably. Christian was taken on board the Britannia as a seaman, and on his return from the West Indies, according to his brother, ‘spoke of Captain Bligh with great respect’. He had worked hard alongside the common sailors, but ‘the Captain had been kind to him’, instructing him in the art of navigation. At the same time Christian had observed ‘that Captain Bligh was very passionate; yet he seemed to pride himself in knowing how to humour him.’ On their second voyage Christian was entered as nominal ‘gunner’ but, as Bligh made clear, was to be treated as an officer. Christian, it would seem, had become Bligh’s protégé. Bligh had taken pains not only to instruct the ambitious young man, but to elevate him, regularly inviting him to join him and his officers at his table for dinner. Christian for his part must have passed muster with his captain, for Bligh was not one to suffer fools, and it was Bligh who recommended Christian to the Admiralty as midshipman on the Bounty. ‘As it was understood that great interest had been made to get Midshipmen sent out in this ship,’ Fletcher’s brother would write, ‘Christian’s friends thought this recommendation…a very great obligation.’ On the return from the South Seas, Fletcher could expect to be promoted to lieutenant.
This promising naval career had not been in the Christian family’s original plans for its second-youngest son; and as the family itself was to play a significant part in the shaping of the events ahead, it is well to introduce its members here. Fletcher Christian was born on 25 September 1764, in his parents’ home in Cumberland, and had been baptized that same day, in Brigham Church, some two miles distant. Baptism on the day of birth was unusual, and implies that the newborn child was not expected to live. His parents, Charles and Ann, had already lost two infants.
Charles Christian came from an old Manx family that had been settled on the English mainland since the seventeenth century. At the age of twenty-two he had married Ann Dixon, the daughter of a dyer and a member of the local gentry well connected with other important north-country families. Ann’s mother was a Fletcher, another old and established Cumberland family. It was after his grandmother’s family that Fletcher Christian was named.
Charles had grown up in the Christians’ ancestral home, Ewanrigg, a forty-two-bedroomed mansion with crenellated battlements overlooking the sea. Reputedly, the property had been won by the Christians from the Bishop of Sodor and Man in a card game. Charles’s mother, Bridget Senhouse, could trace her ancestry back fourteen generations to King Edward I. Such distinctions bore little practical weight, however, and as a younger son (and one of eleven children), Charles inherited only his name and some shares in various family interests. Like all but the eldest son, he was expected to make his own way, which he did as an attorney-at-law, and later as coroner for Cumberland. The main boost to his fortune was his marriage – Ann brought with her a small but respectable property called Moorland Close, just outside Cockermouth, described locally as ‘a quadrangular pile of buildings, in the style of the mediæval manor house, half castle and half farmstead.’ The surrounding wall, originally built to rebuff Scottish border raiders, during Fletcher’s boyhood benignly enclosed an orchard and gardens, while the former guard stand had been converted into a little summer house.
Ten children were born to the young couple, six of whom survived infancy. Fletcher was the fifth surviving child, born twelve years after his eldest brother, John. Although Fletcher was raised in a large family, with cousins and relatives nearby in every direction, his childhood was made precarious by the early death of his father, who passed away in 1768. A month before he died, Charles Christian had written his will declaring himself ‘weak of body’, which suggests a protracted illness.
Ann Christian was now left to raise six children on her own. Fletcher was not yet four; his elder brothers, John, Edward and Charles, were sixteen, ten and six, respectively; his sister, Mary, was eight, while little Humphrey was just three months old. Money was, and evidently had long been, a problem. As early as the year of his first son’s birth, Charles Christian senior had borrowed from his eldest brother, and family records indicate a series of other large ‘loans’ made in later years. Still, under Ann’s management, care was given to Fletcher’s education, and he was sent first to Brigham’s one-room parish school and then to the Cockermouth Free School, which he attended for seven years – and where a younger contemporary was William Wordsworth, the future